@mia, yes, compared to the Indy it flies! Especially those V12 graphics. My folks were visiting and my father was captivated by the demos. He particularly enjoyed the "demograph."

@hamei, no, I figured that's what it meant. But why is it detecting *two* mice? That's why I think there's something afoot with the KVM's mouse emulation feature. Perhaps Irix is seeing both the emulated mouse and the actual HID mouse device on the hub. The real question is whether that's confusing it, or the "lose mouse on logout" issue is something different. Maybe this gets better with later releases of Irix.

@ClassicHasClass: Funny, I never really use the graphical capabilities of my Fuel, mostly MIPSpro and Mathematica, I had a V12 octane before that, so I've never really seen a big change, nevertheless, it's still a very capable box, are you going to move it to gigE?

ClassicHasClass wrote: there are two meeses. 2/3/mouse appears to be the one actually in use; if I remove it, the mouse is not detected. However, even if I remove 2/4/1/mouse, it just comes back. I might need to fiddle with the KVM's mouse emulation to figure out why that is. In general the KVM just works (it still emits usb_hid_reattach errors to the console when I switch away, but unlike the Command Monitor, it redetects it fine when I switch back), *except* in this one case: if I log out as any user other than root. Then the mouse stops working and I have to restart the system. The keyboard works fine, but the mouse stops functioning. However, switching focus is fine, and it doesn't seem to happen if I log out if I was logged in as root. I wonder if there's a permissions problem somewhere, and I don't know if it has anything to do with "the two meeses."

Think it could be realted to the Aten KVM being set in USB Hub emulation mode?

When the Fuel was connected to the iogear model 1764 KVM (which doesn't offer USB hub emulation) I never experienced extraneous mice entries in ioconfig or usb_hid reattach errors.

Don't currently have a Fuel set up to allow additional testing, but do have a Tezro and Onyx350 sharing dual monitors and a USB keyboard and mouse via a Gefen 2x2 DVI DL Switcher/KVM. The The Tezro and O350 are same IP35 hardware family as the Fuel; all three share the similarity of having PS/2 and USB ports. The Gefen 2x2 KVM also doesn't offer USB hub emulation, and there there haven't been any usb_hid reattach errors or extraneous mice with either the Tezro or Onyx 350:

Quick note - if you want to minimise noise, I strongly recommend the Fujistu MAS3367NC + adapter (or native NP 68pin). One of the quietestdrives I've tested so far, and also the 2nd fastest for access time (only beaten by the MAX3036NC, which makes fractionally more noise).

The MAS3367NC is easily the best disk for O2.

Congrats on getting a Fuel!

Ian.

I'm working on a charitable PC build for the Learn Engineering YouTube channel. Please PM/email/call if you'd like to contribute!Donations of any kind of item I can sell to provide funds are also most welcome.mapesdhs@yahoo.com+44 (0)7434 635 121

It's a Fujitsu something or other in there, but it's not very loud. (Then again it sits between an MDD G4 and a quad G5, two machines not noted for their silent operation, so I could be just ignorant. )

Up to 6.5.22 and after a bit of headscratching on apparently circular Nekoware dependencies, just threw them all together in a dist directory and let swmgr sort it out. Gonna get Firefox 3.0.19 working on it next. I still need to fiddle with the mouse emulation on the KVM.

My RAM still hasn't arrived, but the M-Audio 7.1 card did, so I stuck it in one of the 33MHz slots and it works nicely (scaring the cat playing DOOM at top volume). The FireWire card arrived as well, but the Fuel hardware aggregator says it has to be the red board Adaptec and this one is green, but it's OHCI so shouldn't it just work? Is there any point at all to FW if you're not running 6.5.27? I haven't bothered to install it yet.

ClassicHasClass wrote:The FireWire card arrived as well, but the Fuel hardware aggregator says it has to be the red board Adaptec and this one is green, but it's OHCI so shouldn't it just work? Is there any point at all to FW if you're not running 6.5.27? I haven't bothered to install it yet.

I have a blue Adaptec that works ... and a red no-name that works, too. The important thing appears to be the chip - *must* be a TI. Maybe the green Adaptecs used the NEC chip ?

Firewire did work before 6.5.27 - Neko got an external hard disk to run, other people did as well, but it was not easy. If you look back on nekochan there are threads with hinv outputs, conflicting firewire device outputs (I forget which applet one runs to check the firewire bus), lots of helpful advice on mounting a disk, &c &c.

Post-27, it was simple. Probably more robust as well but I did not have any failures with it at 25 or so. (Sorry, can't remember exactly which level.)

I found the firewire very useful at the time for standalone but if you have other means of backup and network storage, and now that SATA is available, it's not such a big deal ... I use firewire now for reading memory cards. It's great for that, even faster than USB on Windows, but in your case, with 600 computers in the room, maybe not such a big selling point ?

As far as I know, no one ever made the 'supported' video input work. Neko got it to display a single frame upside-down once and that's about it. There's a project for your spare time

Eventually, you are going to want to go to 30. It is better, just do it carefully so you don't lose the good stuff.

Oh. If you do play with firewire, beware. Do not try hot-plugging, unplugging. You can get away with it about once out of every three tries. The other two times it will crash the computer, guaranteed. They never got that to work right.

I'm used to FireWire on my Power Macs where I can sling hard disks, system backups over HD Target Mode, DV/HDV and webcams, so fighting with non-hotpluggable iffy mass storage and no video doesn't sound too gratifying. That said, I might as well install it and see if it's recognized, since all of my Macs that need it either have a PCI card already or built-in FW. The card doesn't need drivers for Mac OS, so I'm sure it would work in Irix.

ClassicHasClass wrote:I'm used to FireWire on my Power Macs where I can sling hard disks, system backups over HD Target Mode, DV/HDV and webcams, so fighting with non-hotpluggable iffy mass storage and no video doesn't sound too gratifying.

To be fair, the firewire hard disk never gave me any trouble whatsoever. It was mostly the initial figuring-out period that was shaky.

There is support in Irix for HFS (?) so it's perhaps possible to use an Apple-formatted disk via firewire ? That might be interesting to play with for youse Apple guys.

Sata is so much easier to deal with that interest in firewire disks disappeared when we discovered the LSI adapter cards. But it might still be useful to you.

People were succesful with firewire CD-ROMS as well. And I still use mine for reading CF and SD cards. No one tried a DVD-Writer, as far as I know. CDRTools works with a scsi-ide adapter to write dvd's, so maybe the firewire would also. I tried a SATA DVD-writer without success, but that was quite a while ago. Things may have improved there.

The part you might like to experiment with is the video. Supposedly Irix supports IIDC video input through firewire. The Apple firewire webcam does not work. I got a Texas Instruments firewire webcam that is seen but doesn't work. The Canopus ADVC cards are supposed to work, but I've never heard of anyone who made it happen. They should - they are "supported" after all, maybe a support contract with SGI would be worthwhile

Interesting. I have two IIDC cams here, an iSight (which I believe makes Irix crash, according to the aggregator), and an Orange Micro iBOT. The iBOT is different enough that I might give it a shot. That RAM better arrive today.

I have a Canopus ADVC-300 here too. Is that what you mean by "card"? It's an external FireWire device. I have ADS Pyro A/Vs coming out my ears, but I see Neko tried and failed with those.

More importantly, do these all work with 6.5.22?

I also have a line on a 700MHz R16K card, but the seller wants a lot of money for an untested item and I'm kind of worried about putting it in my only Fuel.

hamei wrote:The part you might like to experiment with is the video. Supposedly Irix supports IIDC video input through firewire. The Apple firewire webcam does not work. I got a Texas Instruments firewire webcam that is seen but doesn't work. The Canopus ADVC cards are supposed to work, but I've never heard of anyone who made it happen. They should - they are "supported" after all, maybe a support contract with SGI would be worthwhile

ClassicHasClass wrote:I have two IIDC cams here, an iSight (which I believe makes Irix crash, according to the aggregator), and an Orange Micro iBOT. The iBOT is different enough that I might give it a shot......I have a Canopus ADVC-300 here too. Is that what you mean by "card"? It's an external FireWire device. I have ADS Pyro A/Vs coming out my ears, but I see Neko tried and failed with those.

Firewire video won't use any of the classic IRIX video tools (e.g. Media Recorder and videod, et al) that you may have experienced on your Indy. Instead FW video use DM10 specific ML video libraries - which aren't included with a default install of the DM10 software package.

After you install the DM10 software package (see below for more on that subject), the DM10, IIDC and AV/C man pages will give you a better idea of which protocols are supported, the software tools provided, and some (basic) hints are to how they're used. Don't mean to bury you in tech notes, but they give the best clues as to what's need to get all the software bits you'll need to get FW video working. None of the DM10 related man pages are available through TechPubs, so I've quoted them here:

Color Representations The IIDC Protocol uses three components with eight bits of precision at all steps of its internal pipeline.

Control Parameters IIDC specific control parameters are identified in ml_iidc.h which is included with the IIDC subsystem. Other controls can be found through standard ML methods, or by using mlquery as:

Color Representations The AV/C Protocol uses three components with eight bits of precision at all steps of its internal pipeline.

Control Parameters AV/C specific control parameters are identified in ml_avc.h which is included with the AV/C subsystem. Other controls can be found through standard ML methods, or by using mlquery as:

As mentioned earlier, if you do a "Default Installation" of the DM10 software package, you *won't* get the IIDC and AV/C software. To get around that select the "Custom Installation ..." tab, open the drop arrows next each of the DM10 selections and manually select ALL of the subsystems, including/especially the DM10 Dev stuff.

That sould give you the IIDC and AV/C source code samples nekonoko mentioned using (read down starting here). The acv_vidtogfx or iidc_vidtogfx executables sound like a reasonable place to start testing your FW cameras. To do much more than that, or take advantage of the avc_vidtomemory/iidc_vidtomemory program stubs you'll likely have to code your own app.

ClassicHasClass wrote:More importantly, do these all work with 6.5.22?